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A masterpiece of contrasting moods, Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

One of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World' Jean Rhys's spell-binding novel Wide Sargasso Sea, inspired by Jane Eyre and winner the Royal Society of Literature Award is beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. 'There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now... Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?' If Antoinette Cosway, a spirited Creole heiress, could have foreseen the terrible future that awaited her, she would not have married the young Englishman. Initially drawn to her beauty and sensuality, he becomes increasingly frustrated by his inability to reach into her soul. He forces Antoinette to conform to his rigid Victorian ideals, unaware that in taking away her identity he is destroying a part of himself as well as pushing her towards madness. Set against the lush backdrop of 1830s Jamaica, Jean Rhys's powerful, haunting masterpiece was inspired by her fascination with the first Mrs Rochester, the mad wife in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. 'Compelling, painful and exquisite' Guardian 'Brilliant. A tale of dislocation and dispossession, which Rhys writes with a kind of romantic cynicism, desperate and pungent' The Times 'Rhys turns a menacing cipher into a grieving, plausible young woman, and one whose story says whole worlds about global mixtures, about the misunderstandings between the colonized, the colonizers and the people who can't easily say which they are' Time Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother, and came to England when she was sixteen. Her first book, a collection of stories called The Left Bank, was published in 1927. This was followed by Quartet (originally Postures, 1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). None of these books was particularly successful and with the outbreak of war they went out of print. Jean Rhys dropped from sight until nearly twenty years later she was discovered living reclusively in Cornwall. During those years she had accumulated the stories collected in Tigers are Better-Looking. In 1966 she made a sensational reappearance with Wide Sargasso Sea, which won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W. H. Smith Award. Her final collection of stories, Sleep It Off Lady, appeared in 1976 and Smile Please, her unfinished autobiography, was published posthumously in 1979. Jean Rhys died in 1979.

Antoinette Cosway's family live in Jamaica, an island as gorgeous as Eden. However, colonial tensions are becoming unbearable as the islanders repeatedly terrorise the 'white cockroaches' in the Cosway household. Antoinette's marriage to a visiting Englishman seems to offer an escape from this claustrophobic society, but while on honeymoon her husband receives a mysterious letter. When the rumours start to tangle with half-heard conversations the couple suddenly find themselves travelling towards an uncertain and terrible future.

Inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and drawing upon memories of her own Caribbean childhood, this classic study of betrayal is Jean Rhys' brief, beautiful masterpiece.

Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys's return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction's most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind. A new introduction by the award-winning Edwidge Danticat, author most recently of Claire of the Sea Light, expresses the enduring importance of this work. Drawing on her own Caribbean background, she illuminates the setting's impact on Rhys and her astonishing work.

In 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. She has escaped personal tragedy and has come to France to find courage and seek independence. She tells herself to expect nothing, especially not kindness, least of all from men. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will dye her hair blonde.

Jean Rhys was a talent before her time with an impressive ability to express the anguish of young, single women. In Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys created the powerfully modern portrait of Sophia Jansen, whose emancipation is far more painful and complicated than she could expect, but whose confession is flecked with triumph and elation.

Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s.

Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage disturbing rumours begin to circulate, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

Often considered Jean Rhys's most autobiographical novel, this masterful and moving work follows a chorus girl, Anna, who struggles to adjust to cold and inhospitable England after a childhood in the West Indies. When an affair that at first feels like salvation comes to a disastrous end, Anna begins to unravel.

The last of the four novels Jean Rhys wrote in interwar Paris, Good Morning, Midnight is the culmination of a searing literary arc, which established Rhys as an astute observer of human tragedy. Her everywoman heroine, Sasha, must confront the loves- and losses- of her past in this mesmerizing and formally daring psychological portrait.

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' A gorgeous clothbound edition of Jean Rhys's great masterpiece of desire and madness in the Caribbean, published for the novel's fiftieth anniversary. Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel's heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys's brief, beautiful masterpiece. 'She took one of the works of genius of the nineteenth century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the twentieth century' Michele Roberts, The Times

New to Penguin Classics, the remarkable, devastating collected stories by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Some of Jean Rhys's most powerful writing is to be found in this rich, dark collection of her collected stories. Her fictional world is haunted by her own, painful memories: of cheap hotels and drab Parisian cafes; of devastating love affairs; of her childhood in Dominica; of drifting through European cities, always on the periphery and always perilously close to the abyss. Rendered in extraordinarily vivid, honest prose, these stories show Rhys at the height of her literary powers and offer a fascinating counterpoint to her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. This volume includes all the stories from her three collections,The Left Bank (1927), Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976).

'It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known', says Anna, 18 years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London. But there, dismayed by the unfamiliar cold and greyness, she is absolutely alone, and unconsciously floating from innocence to harsh experience. Voyage in the Dark was first published in 1934, but it could have been written today. It is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society, and an exploration of exile and breakdown; all written in Jean Rhys's hauntingly simple and beautiful style.

After being left by Mr Mackenzie (and not the other way around) Julia faces facts. Once glamorous and sought-after she is now down-at-heel after a string of unsuccessful affairs and leads a jaded, faded life in a tawdry Paris hotel. Then the maintenance cheques stop and she is forced to change her circumstances. She makes a decision: to return to London to her paralysed mother and worthy, martyred sister. It is to be a new leaf and a new life. But standing on her own is more difficult than she thought - she is restricted by the very existence she has created. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is a brilliant, yet brutal, portrait of a woman struggling to retrieve both life and love.

Living in Paris with her reckless, vagabond husband Stephan, Marya is very near to being happy. She enjoys their haphazard existence, never questioning how he lives, never wanting to know the truth. When Stephan is suddenly imprisoned she is left penniless and alone. Taken up by a sophisticated English couple, the Heidlers, who gradually overwhelm her with their own desires, Marya finds her sense of reality slipping further and further away.

Set against a background of winter-wet streets and smoke-filled cafés, Jean Rhys's first novel is both poignant and disturbingly intimate in its vivid depiction of a woman on her own.

A brilliant companion piece to Wide Sargasso Sea, this is Jean Rhys's beautifully written, bitter-sweet autobiography, covering her chequered early years in Dominica, England and Paris. Jean Rhys wrote this autobiography in her old age, now the celebrated author of Wide Sargasso Sea but still haunted by memories of her troubled past: her precarious jobs on chorus lines and relationships with unsuitable men, her enduring sense of isolation and her decision at last to become a writer. From the early days on Dominica to the bleak time in England, living in bedsits on gin and little else, to Paris with her first husband, this is a lasting memorial to a unique artist. Includes an introduction by Diana Athill.

Julius Firmicus Maternus, a native of Sicily, was a Roman lawyer of the senatorial class. He lived in the first half of the fourth century AD (c.280-c.360). He was also a student of Greek astrology, which forms the basis of this book. Of this book, James Herschel Holden writes, "The Mathesis is the lengthiest astrological treatise that has come down to us from the classical period. It consists of eight books, of which the first forms an introductory essay on astrology, and the rest set forth the fundamentals of Greek astrology. Several sections contain material that is found nowhere else...." (History of Horoscopic Astrology, pg. 66.) The translator writes, "Magic, philosophy, science and theology combine in strange ways in the thinking of the last centuries of the Roman empire..... Firmicus seemed worthy of note for many reasons. He is almost alone as author of works produced both before and after an apparent conversion to Christianity.... He left a lengthy handbook detailing the astrological practices of his day, the only work which has come down to us in its entirety 90% complete: Holden] out of numerous astrological treatises written in the Hellenistic and Roman periods..... This manual was important because it was the channel for astrological lore to the Middle Ages and Renaissance." (from the Preface) Jean Rhys Bram holds a degree in Latin from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Classics from New York University. She taught Latin, ancient Greek, and Mythology at Hunter College until her retirement. At 92, she continues to read widely and tutor students. She enjoys the company of twelve cats.

"Reading such stories as a group . . . can be overwhelming.Yet it is precisely this intense immersion in experience that is the essence of Rhys' art. The force of her stories lies in thefusion of elegant prose with an uncannyn penetration of the darkerreaches of the soul."—Washington Post Book World

Jean Rhys may be best known as the author of Wide Sargasso Sea and other novels. But she was as accomplished a shortstory writer as a novelist. The Collected Short Storiesbrings all of Jean Rhys's stories together in one volume.

Informed by the places she lived and the people she knew, these stories, set in London, Paris, adn the Caribbean, hold and hauntthe reader because they call up emotions, places, atmosphere,even physical sensations. They are, as Ford Madox Ford writes, "extraordinarily distinguished by the rendering of passion."

This volume of thirty-six stories contains those from TheLeft Bank (1927), Tigers are Better-Looking (1968), and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976), and three stories that werenever collected, "Kismet," "Invitation to the Dance," and "TheWhistling Bird."